A constellation of conservative activists who have long clashed with congressional Republican leaders issued a joint call Wednesday for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his top deputies to step down, marking the latest round of criticism the Kentucky Republican has received from members of his party.

In a letter to McConnell and in a joint news conference, the activists vented frustration with the Senate's lack of major legislative accomplishments this year, including their failure to undo the Affordable Care Act.

“It is time for you and your leadership team to step aside, for new leadership that is committed to the promises made to the American people,” says the letter, which is signed by six activists.

They did not immediately endorse a replacement for the job of majority leader.

11. Worse. These are the FOUNDERS of the modern GOP.

More important is who the people are. Two of them have histories literally going back to the earliest days of the modern conservative movement.

First there’s Richard Viguerie, basically the inventor of right wing direct mail fundraising. In many ways Viguerie invented clickbait and fake news decades before the Internet. He’s 84.

Then there’s Brent Bozell. Bozell has lived his entire life in the sinecure right wing activism world, which some very unnice people are ungenerous enough to call the world of ‘wingnut welfare’. He founded the Media Research Center in 1987 – full-time yakking about ‘liberal media bias’. His father was L. Brent Bozell, Jr., partner with Bill Buckley is launching much of what we know as movement conservatism today. Among many other things he ghosted Barry Goldwater’s ‘Conscience of a Conservative’, a bible of young conservatives in the early 60s which helped launch his 1964 presidential run.

To the extent that Trump is something ‘new’ in the GOP firmament, these folks are as old as it gets. The other three all predate Trump and in key cases predate the Tea Party. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots is the ‘newest’ person on the list.

This doesn’t mean they can’t write letters or that they’re not influential. But this is an example of what I think is really the truth. There’s no new anything. Trump is the candidate of the most unreconstructed elements of movement conservatism.